INTERVIEW: Cirque Mechanics chases windmills in ‘Zephyr’
Photo: The action of Zephyr, a new show from Cirque Mechanics, centers on a windmill. Photo courtesy of Paris Photographics / Provided by official website.
Cirque Mechanics, the Las Vegas-based circus company founded by Chris Lashua and Aida Lashua, has brought a windmill to Midtown Manhattan. That’s not a symbolic statement about some type of Don Quixote-inspired production. The designers of Cirque Mechanics have built a literal windmill in the New Victory Theater, where their show Zephyr continues through Sunday, April 16.
The company has always distinguished itself by building a large apparatus as the center of their performance. From this towering structure flows the action, including high-flying aerial work and body-bending contortionism. For Zephyr, the Lashuas thought that a windmill, and what that apparatus represents, would be a fitting lens to enjoy the circus arts.
“The first thing is the way that we distinguish ourselves from many of the other circus companies, new circus or old,” Chris Lashua said in a recent phone interview. “We have usually some large-scale mechanical apparatus component that we build the show around, and that device can take many shapes. Usually the desire is to find a way to accomplish the work of circus, whether that’s to lift and fly an aerialist or transport a contortionist, and in this case, we decided we wanted to be able to fly the aerialists around the stage and decided that that apparatus would be ground-based. And based on that, we then start thinking about environments. What is that structure going to end up looking like? How can we insert it into some familiar landscape? In the case of this show, Zephyr, it became a windmill, but that shape could very easily have been a lighthouse, a sequoia tree, a prison tower, anything that fits the profile of that device.”
Lashua, who is billed as director, founder, machine designer, fabricator and problem solver, sat down with his team and decided on the windmill because of humankind’s relationship to the wind — a relationship that dates back thousands of years. Humans have always tried to harness the wind and create something from its force.
When thinking of this idea, Lashua needed to make sure his dream could fit into a theater like the New Victory and the other venues around the country that will host Zephyr.
“My wife, who is my producing partner, reminds me to take my producer’s hat off sometimes when we’re designing because I know where these things are going to tour and how quickly they need to be built and how they need to travel,” he said. “So myself and my design partner, we kind of have those parameters in our minds when we’re conceiving any of the work that we do. So it’s rare that we get ourselves in a situation where later we find out, oh no, it’s not going to fit, or, oh no, it’s too expensive, or it’s too complicated to build. All of those things are baked in from the original early, early days of creation. Because I’m not building something and then trying to figure out how to do things with it. We know where these devices will end up, and we know how quickly they need to be set up and how much space they can take and all those things.”
When Lashua and the company are building a new show, they consider the expectations of the audience that will one day experience the circus acts in person. Of course, circuses draw both the young and young at heart, so a show like Zephyr needs to be accessible to many age groups.
“Our first show was in collaboration with the Circus Center of San Francisco, and it was for the 30th anniversary of a Bay Area company, a circus company called the Pickle Family Circus,” Lashua said. “It was a family audience. My boys were all young at the time. My youngest was 2 years old or something like that. This was in 2004. So we built the kind of show that we wanted to go see. As it turned out, those shows actually happened to be perfectly appropriate for young and old. A lot of times companies will market the shows that way because they want to try and get into a certain area. We didn’t really do that. We just built shows that we liked.”
So, in a Cirque Mechanics show, there will be physical comedy, for sure, but the performers treat the audience members as intelligent patrons (because they are intelligent, as Lashua said), and young people are given the benefit of the doubt that they will be able to follow along.
“I’m very proud of the fact that a grandfather can come with their hipster son and that hipster son’s 5-year-old, and everybody has a good time,” he said. “And that’s not really by design. I mean, it’s turned out to be that way. I love it because that’s just the sensibility I have because I’ve got kids. … So now when we create the shows, it’s kind of a natural thing. Once in a while, there’s a piece of choreography, and we’ll say, oh, that’s a little racy or that’s a little sexy or something. And we might need to tone that down, but I think, much like the creation of the physical structures, we know what we like to do, and we know who are our audiences are and have been. So lucky for us there’s a sweet spot there.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Cirque Mechanics presents Zephyr, directed by Chris Lashua, at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
